Ghazal 19, Verse 1

{19,1}*

1a) what help, in {my affliction / sympathy with me},
will friends attempt to bestow?
1b) will friends attempt to bestow help, in {my affliction / sympathy with
me}?
1c) as if friends will attempt to bestow help, in {my affliction / sympathy
with me}!

2a) by the time the wound fills up, won't the fingernails grow? 2b) as if, by the time the wound fills up, the fingernails won't
grow!

Nazm:

Bekhud
Dihlavi:

How excellently he has presented the meaning that my friends,
in sympathy-- what more can they do than having my nails cut? In the state
of madness, I keep scratching the wound and don't let it heal. After the nails
are cut, it's hoped that the wound will quickly heal. In opposition to my
friends, I'm thinking, by the time the wound heals, my cut nails too will
grow, and all their efforts will become useless in a single moment, because
I will again deepen the wound. (40)

Faruqi:

FWP:

The aave;Nge ending is an archaic form
of the modern Urdu aa))e;Nge ; some divans
update the spelling, but I follow Arshi in retaining the original; GRAMMAR.

The use with sa((ii of farmaanaa
, 'to command', rather than karnaa , 'to do', suggests
respect and formality: the friends would 'be pleased to do' an attempt or,
more literally, would 'command the doing of' an attempt. 'Bestow' doesn't
quite capture it, but it's the best I could come up with. Of course, the use
of the language of respect also opens the clear possibility of a sarcastic
or ironic reading as well.

In this whole ghazal, because of the refrain, the emphasis on inshaa))iyah speech is
unusually pronounced. The real pleasure of it is the multivalent readings
not only offered but even enforced, since both lines can be read in different
tones, with different emotions, to greatly different rhetorical effect. When
the possibilities of (1) are multiplied by those of (2), a veritable tree
of readings fans out from the original lines. For discussion of the multivalence
of kyaa and its role in meaning-creation, see {15,10}.

The result is a kind of encyclopedia of the lover's relationship
with his friends. He wants to know whether they will help at all, he wants
to know how they will help, he scorns the usefulness of their help; he finds
it obvious that their help is in vain, he is indignant at the futility of
their efforts. To add to the complexity, ;Gam-;xvaarii
, literally 'grief-eating', is both the suffering that the grief-stricken
person himself undergoes, and the compassion that his sympathetic friends
feel when they share his pain. The work done here by merii
is that of 'my', and also that of 'with me'; for more on this see {41,6}.

Compare Mir's treatment of a similar theme, the absurd naivete of the friends who expect to be able to 'cure' the lover [M{40,5}]:

[they 'cure' me of the madness of passion--
it's become unsound, the mind of my friends]

Mir ends up, most wittily, with the suspicion that they're the ones who are crazy-- by believing that they can 'cure' him, his friends have shown that their minds are more unbalanced than his own.

The present verse also works by implication, leaving a great
deal unstated. We have to know, or deduce, the connection between the fingernails,
the cutting of the fingernails by the helpful friends, the healing of the
wound, and the use of the regrown fingernails to reopen the wound. We have
to already know, or deduce, the lover's radical intransigence, without which
the verse would make no sense at all.